ROAD COMEDIES AS A HYBRID SUBGENRE: “SAFE AND SOUND” MOVIE SAMPLE

Abstract

Comedy and road movies as a genre in the history of cinema attract attention.Especially as of the silent
cinema period, the genre of comedy takes its roots from the comedy and Persian tradition as a genre
of ancient Greek drama, but it has also been fed by sub-genres of drama such as vaudeville, burlesque,
sketch, and game forms such as Commedia dell’arte, parody and pantomime. In its center, road, passenger,
vehicle, travel, movement, identity, culture, freedom, transformation, geography etc. Road movies,
on the other hand, take their roots mainly from the western genre. It is sometimes seen that the narrative
of comedy films is built at the center of road and road stories. As a result of this, we come across road
comedies, which consist of both comedy films and road films. From this perspective, road comedies in
the cinema can be seen as a hybrid subgenre. This hybrid subgenre is also encountered in Turkish cinema.
In this study, the movie named Sağ Salim, a road comedy directed by Ersoy Güler and produced in
2012, was chosen within the framework of purposeful sampling, and the genre traditions of both comedy
and road movies were evaluated and Sağ Salim, it was seen that the film was influenced by the generic
traditions-consensus of road and comedy films in American cinema.